Within hours of the invasion, McCain knew exactly what was happening and issued a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion. Obama issued a boilerplate “everyone should just calm down” statement. Later as Obama figured out what was going on, he swerved over to the McCain position.
This is why voters are nervous about an Obama White House.
Update: TIME summarizes well:
Obama’s campaign made two early missteps. First, in its initial statement, it called for restraint from both Russia and Georgia. “Generally, when a country is being invaded, you don’t call on it to show restraint,” a senior McCain foreign policy adviser responded. (The adviser declined to be identified, aware that the criticism could also apply to the Administration, which called for restraint as well.) Then Obama’s campaign released a statement questioning McCain’s objectivity in the crisis, since a top McCain aide, Randy Scheunemann, had lobbied for the Georgians. When the Kremlin’s own lobbyists made the same point, McCain’s campaign fired back. “The reaction of the Obama campaign to this crisis, so at odds with our democratic allies and yet so bizarrely in sync with Moscow, doesn’t merely raise questions about Senator Obama’s judgment — it answers them,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement Saturday.
One Response
August 12th, 2008 at 10:24 am
sometimes it pays to do your homework.
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